At 23, I am afraid of the dark again.
November has begun and we are very much in the autumnal-winter darkness, daylight is becoming ever so sparse and each day draws to a close quicker.
We get up to go to work in the dark and much more daunting, we come home in the dark. At twenty-three years old, I have become afraid of the dark again.
Living as a woman at the height of harassment and violence against women by men, men that are strangers, and men that are supposedly there to ‘protect’ society, there is very little safety for women walking the streets. As the darkness comes quicker being out when the light is no longer around becomes much more terrifying.
But, what can we do? As a woman who relies on public transport and a half-hour walk to work, when I leave my house it is dark, and when I leave work it is dark. 5 pm is not a particularly late time to be out, but when it is dark at that time it becomes scarier and a much more dangerous prospect to be out alone.
I write this as the last few weeks I have been experiencing some anxiety around this issue, and I know the best way to deal with any anxiety, for me, is to write about it. Anxieties around a multitude of topics is something I am not too shy about writing about and have been a frequent focus on this page.
Today folks, the focus is on being afraid of the dark.
The anxiety really came into play after I had been harassed by a man in the middle of town a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t talked about it much since it happened because it left me feeling really uncomfortable and unsafe, and it also happened as it got dark.
The incident in question followed a nice day out with a friend and I was walking to the supermarket afterward to do a food shop. It was the centre of town, busy, as you would expect of a Saturday, with all kinds of people, families, couples, old people, young people. I had my headphones in, minding my own business, and a man on a bike shouts ‘nice arse.’ I brushed it off and continued to walk on, but I felt so icky to put it straight. I got on with the shop and paced home.
Anxiety of the body after said incident.
All I wanted to do was take off the clothes I was wearing and cover my body so you couldn’t make out my shape. I felt so watched and uncomfortable in my own skin. I rarely wear dresses and this just made me feel too uncomfortable to wear them again. Even putting the dress away after washing it a couple of days later did not feel right.
It had begun to make me feel self-conscious about my body again, and the progress I had made since the last time I had written about body anxieties seemed to have all gone down the drain. At this current moment, I am in a limbo state of avoidance, I try not to think about my body avoiding looking at it as much as I can because after feeling so observed I don’t really want to look at it. But, at the same time, I also have better days where I don’t think about any of this, usually because I am distracted by good things, happy things in my life. However, I have noticed since this I have become much more sensitive to talking about body-related things or comments on my appearance more so than I have been for a long while, even if the comments are supposedly positive.
For example, my mum had said I looked like I had lost weight and my skin had looked clearer and better. Now, yes those are nice comments, compliments in fact, but with everything that had been going on, and my own anxieties around my skin and body, which I have talked about before it just gave me more anxiety. Like, there was an unknown pressure to not change and to maintain this or I would not be any good. This was something I struggled internally with when I lost a lot of weight due to a bad bout of anxiety and depression. I eventually got through it and I don’t feel as bad as I did then, but it did trigger some things.
This was not the first time this cycle of thinking and feeling had happened.
The incident then had me thinking about all the other times I have been harassed by men on the street. Since restrictions lifted and we were allowed outside again, it has happened to me several times and one of them when I was walking home from work.
It also brought me back to the time I was, I don’t want to say assaulted because it sounds so violent, but I was groped by a man on the street. This is something I wrote about a year ago on my old website. It happened after a day at uni and I was walking with a group of friends to the pub, me and another friend were walking a bit behind and a homeless man asked for money. Like many of the youth today, cash is something I never have on hand so unfortunately had to tell this man I didn’t have any. As we walked away he grabbed my bum. It was a shock because as many people do, you don’t expect a stranger to do that, let alone in broad daylight while my friend is right next to me. It was something I didn’t process until I landed upon Laura Bates’s book, Misogynation and I looked back on that event.
In this case, it was dead of winter and I was as covered as humanly possible. But like then and the last time I was harassed, it doesn’t matter what you are wearing, where you are, what time it is, light or dark, day or night or who you are with, men will do what they will.
Being a woman is hard.
This may start to sound like a tirade against men, as it should be because there are too many men acting like this and much worse. The cases of Sabina Nasser and Sarah Everard, the recent run of spikings in clubs with the perpetrators moving towards injecting women with god knows what concoctions and the rise in domestic abuse during the lockdown periods make it a terrifying world to be a woman in.
I am not going to talk about solutions because we know them, but the government, institutions, society and the men themselves are not doing enough to change how women are treated. Like everything, it starts at home, with men calling out other men, calling in their mates over what they say and how they treat women is where it starts.
All of this makes it so terrifying to just exist as a woman, this is the level of anxiety most if not all women live with on a daily basis. This is a high level of anxiety we carry on top of the worries of being a human in the current climate and sprinkle on day-to-day stresses, it is a lot to try and deal with.
What I have written about, my experience, it’s the norm for women. I have heard worse stories, and I can guarantee you every woman you know has a story of harassment, whatever type it may be, they will have one and more often more.
Too often you see the one thing women would do if men were locked away for 24 hours — they would go for a walk at night. They would not be afraid of the dark. I hope one day we don’t have to be afraid of the dark.
